New England Review

From balloon races to hidden microphones

 

Women welders (Shipbuilding Corp., Pascagoula, MS) – via NARA

NARA, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, has uploaded 100,000 images to the Wikimedia Commons area of Wikipedia. You can browse the images or even help categorize them. This digital outgrowth of the nation’s attic contains everything from Kiowa artwork on buckskin to aerial views of Cleveland and Los Angeles, images of WWI chemical warfare, prohibition-era Detroit, balloon races, women working in WWII factories, a famous author holding his baby, V-bomb damage in London, and the Chapstick tubes that held hidden microphones, for use in the Watergate break-in…

We see the planet complete

Everything that’s powerful about Don DeLillo’s writing is contained in his short story “Human Moments in World War III,” about two astronauts orbiting earth during a futuristic conflict. DeLillo uses the science fiction genre to let blunt emotions mix with caustic social commentary:

The banning of nuclear weapons has made the world safe for war.

I try not to think big thoughts or submit to rambling abstractions. But the urge sometimes comes over me. Earth orbit puts men into philosophical temper. How can we help it? We see the planet complete. We have a privileged vista. In our attempts to be equal to the experience, we tend to meditate importantly on subjects like the human condition. It makes a man feel universal, floating over the continents, seeing the rim of the world, a line as clear as a compass arc, knowing it is just a turning of the bend to Atlantic twilight, to sediment plumes and kelp beds, an island chain glowing in the dusky sea.

Read a longer excerpt of the story at the PEN American Center site. The story is also contained in DeLillo’s latest book, The Angel Esmeralda.

Scifi’s Golden Age

At The Library of America web site, Gary K. Wolfe discusses the Golden Age of scifi in tandem of the publication of the lavish boxed set American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s:

By the 1950s, science fiction had been writing for years about atomic power and the possibility of nuclear destruction, but after August 1945 these speculations became the matter of urgent public anxieties, exacerbated by the Soviet development of similar weapons, the testing of vastly more powerful hydrogen weapons, and the emerging Cold War. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists seemed to invite apocalyptic thinking with the introduction of its famous “Doomsday Clock” in 1947, and the 1950s was peppered with cautionary mainstream bestsellers such as Philip Wylie’s Tomorrow! (1954), Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957), and Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon (1959). A renewed interest in rocketry and space exploration was reflected by films like Destination Moon (1950), enthusiastic articles in popular magazines like Collier’s, and even theme park rides like Disneyland’s “Rocket to the Moon” (introduced in 1955). The launch of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, by the Soviet Union in 1957 lent a sense of public-policy urgency to space exploration as well as to nuclear fear.

[read more]

 

Time-collecting

Remek/Gubarev (via Wikimedia)

Private Universe, Czech documentarian Helena Třeštíková’s latest film, records a single family over the course of 37 years, from the 1970s to the present day. It screened at the 10th anniversary of Silverdocs with little fanfare. No glossy postcards, no slick web campaign. When you spend nearly four decades creating a work of art – Třeštíková calls this one of her “time-collecting films,” according to Variety’s Eddie Cockrell – the result speaks for itself. The film documents Petr and Jana Kettner as they raise their kids amidst the historical gyrations of their country, from the era of Soviet domination – a time when, as the film puts it, “There was nothing to buy, nowhere to travel, and life was quiet” – through to the end of The Cold War and more recent developments in Europe. Honza, the Kettner’s son, belongs to a certain generation of children raised in the 1970s and 80s whose common reference points are often global: the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the passing of the Millennium, and so on. The subtly steely filmmaking decision is to avoid one specific moment in time – or one dramatic sequence in the lives of its subjects – in favor of a steady accumulation of years connected by leitmotifs and lyric patterns. The film weaves in television coverage of historical events, stamping it with a Czech impression by focusing on elements as various as the national coverage of the Challenger disaster and the ongoing career of the ubiquitous singer Karel Gott (his rendition of “Paint it Black” is available on YouTube). Space travel is used memorably throughout to suggest flights of fancy and imaginative outbursts that connect the personal with the public. The astronaut Vladimír Remek made the Czechs third into space, a point of national pride that also lends poignancy to the report, conveyed near the end of the film, of the first privately-funded excursion beyond Earth’s atmosphere. (This enterprise gives an additional twist to the film’s multivalent title, at least as it has been translated into English.) It’s sometime said that a person is “lost in their own private world,” but the film suggests that a private universe is an impossible dream.

Watch an Interview with Helena Třeštíková from the Institute of Documentary Film on Vimeo.

 

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